- Nordic investors reveal a taste for the...
- Nordic funds take flight to infrastructu...
- Norwegian investors have high hopes for...
- What is liability driven investment?
- Illmarinen CIO takes ‘rare’ opportunity...
- Russia’s consumer explosion
- The Latin America hedge fund opportunity
- Commodities continue to attract business...
- Shedding bonds for an energetic future
- Norway’s global fund spreads its wings
Investors in Danish equities will be content. According to the latest figures from ABN Amro’s Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2008, Danish stocks returned a respectable 7 per cent in real terms over the course of last year.
Not bad considering the US returned 1 per cent and Sweden pulled in a miserable -7 per cent – not to mention the -28 per cent the Irish stock exchange notched up.
But times could have been better. In 2006, Danish equities pulled in returns of 15 per cent but, in 2007, the Copenhagen Stock Exchange was eclipsed by a couple of its Nordic peers. Norway, for example, posted figures of 10 per cent while the Finnish stock market returned a healthy 22 per cent.
This might go someway to explaining why total pension assets in Denmark rose by just 3 per cent to 4 per cent last year to DKr2.375trn (€318bn) compared to a 10-year average of 8 per cent.
“Over the last 10 years, pension assets on average climbed by just under 8 per cent a year. One has to go right back to the crisis years of 2001-02 to find a lower rate of growth in pensions assets,” says Forsikring & Pension, the Danish insurance association, which published the asset growth figures last month. Figures were based on the assets of life insurance companies, multi-employer pension schemes, corporate pension schemes, banks, the labour market supplementary scheme ATP, the SP scheme and public authority pension fund LD.
The performance of the country’s bond market did not help. While US bonds returned 6 per cent in real terms, with the world average also at 6 per cent, Danish paper notched just -2 per cent, according to the ABN yearbook. Again, this was better than Sweden (-3 per cent) but was shy of Finland’s 0.6 per cent. The UK pulled in 0.3 per cent and Switzerland returned 1 per cent.
Since 2000, the picture has been a little rosier for Denmark with equities returning 9.5 per cent during the seven-year period and bonds returning 4.3 per cent. This was comparable with Norwegian figures of 10.8 per cent and 4.5 per cent respectively, but was way ahead of Sweden’s 1.4 per cent and 4.3 per cent.
According to the ABN yearbook, China, India and Brazil were the best-performing equity markets in 2007, notching up real returns in excess of 40 per cent. “For the second year, the real stars were the emerging markets,” says Rolf Elgeti at ABN. “The top three performers were all Brics, with off-the-scale returns of 117 per cent for China, 74 per cent for India and 47 per cent for Brazil. The smaller emerging markets also gave excellent returns, except for Argentina at -6 per cent.”
CN
